macOS Could Obj-C do this? Is it to hard for me.

[CrazyIllini]

Hello. Right now I am learning Obj-C as my first programming language. I have no prior experience. In the (near?) future I would like to build an application that would grab RSS feeds from the internet and converts them to amazons format .azw (or to PDF and then to .azw). Is this possible to do with Obj-C? Would a be able to do this right after finishing my book?

Oh btw the name of the book is Programming in Objective-C 2.0 by Stephan Kochan.

 

[GorillaPaws]

Hello. Right now I am learning Obj-C as my first programming language. I have no prior experience. In the (near?) future I would like to build an application that would grab RSS feeds from the internet and converts them to amazons format .azw (or to PDF and then to .azw). Is this possible to do with Obj-C? Would a be able to do this right after finishing my book?

Oh btw the name of the book is Programming in Objective-C 2.0 by Stephan Kochan.

The Kochan book is great, but you've got a fairly complex project in mind. Are there existing tools you plan to use for converting to .azw? I assume you're going to want a GUI (although I guess it would be possible to do something like this from the command line)? Regardless, this isn't something you're going to be able to do straight-away after reading Kochan. You're going to want to read Hillegass, and a lot of Apple documentation.

This might be more easily (and certainly more quickly) achieved by using a scripting approach if the tools to do the individual steps already exist.

 

[HiRez]

Hello. Right now I am learning Obj-C as my first programming language. I have no prior experience. In the (near?) future I would like to build an application that would grab RSS feeds from the internet and converts them to amazons format .azw (or to PDF and then to .azw). Is this possible to do with Obj-C? Would a be able to do this right after finishing my book?

Oh btw the name of the book is Programming in Objective-C 2.0 by Stephan Kochan.

It sounds possible except converting to the Amazon book format. Is that format open? Is there documentation on it? Or you will need to find a framework (code library) that someone else has written to do that part and make calls into it. If it's C-based, which many frameworks are, you should be able to do that. Don't know if it's the best starter project because you'll have to deal with some issues that probably aren't in the book, like calling external code, using C-based APIs, and maybe RSS feeds (don't know if that book covers NSURL and related classes).

 

[xStep]

You will not be limited by the Objective-C language but instead by your knowledge and capability to learn and apply new ideas.

You'll have to do the research to get the appropriate specifications for RSS feeds and the AZW format. The AZW format is Amazon's proprietary DRM-restricted format, so there may not be any publicly available spec for it. Apple has a framework to deal with building PDF documents. This should make creating PDFs much easier.

 

[CrazyIllini]

OK thank you for all the quick responses. I did a little research and did not see any documentation on converting PDFs to .awz however you can send a PDF file to an email address that amazon provides you and they will send it back in .awz format. Here is the like to the article in which I found this.

http://k.indled.com/The-Amazon-Kindle/how-to-convert-and-read-adobe-acrobat-pdf-ebooks-on-your-amazon-kindle/#more-14

So say that you wrote a program that transfered all your RSS feeds to a PDF and sent them to this address. Would you be able to receive the email that they send back to you and acces that file?

 

[xStep]

So say that you wrote a program that transfered all your RSS feeds to a PDF and sent them to this address. Would you be able to receive the email that they send back to you and acces that file?

The file is just data, but without knowledge of how to use it, it is just a blob of useless data. You would want a device that can reader it, like the amazon device or an iPhone/iPod Touch with Amazons software on it.

 

[CrazyIllini]

The file is just data, but without knowledge of how to use it, it is just a blob of useless data. You would want a device that can reader it, like the amazon device or an iPhone/iPod Touch with Amazons software on it.

Ya of course I would move it to the Amazon Kindle. Thats the point of writing this. So you could read your blogs on your Kindle without getting nickled and dimed by amazon.


On the other hand, how would you access the RSS feeds? I honestly have no idea and flipping throw my book and I saw no mention on doing anything like this.

 

[beg_ne]

Ya of course I would move it to the Amazon Kindle. Thats the point of writing this. So you could read your blogs on your Kindle without getting nickled and dimed by amazon.


On the other hand, how would you access the RSS feeds? I honestly have no idea and flipping throw my book and I saw no mention on doing anything like this.

Here is a good start:

http://blog.joeldev.com/2008/12/cocoa-example-simple-rss-parsing/

You'll have to google around for stuff and read the docs in Xcode. The ObjC book is good but doesn't cover a lot more than the language basics.

To really make an app you'll have to get comfortable with the Cocoa API and how to use Xcode and IB.

 

[MacDonaldsd]

On the mac there is the PubSub framework (this isn't on the iPhone), which will help with RSS side of things. Like everyone else has said, it is the conversion to amazon's proprietary format that would be the issue.